‘Trek’ has drifted since ‘Next Generation’

Every day after middle school, I'd make popcorn and sprawl out on the living-room carpet. Impatiently, I'd wait for the screen to darken and the following words to escape Patrick Stewart's lips: "Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."

After he spoke, the Enterprise banked and shot into warp drive, and a new world unfolded on-screen for the next hour, minus commercial interruptions. Those words began an hour of escape.

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" was appointment TV for me, and I was deeply fascinated by the show: A poster of the ship hung on my wall for many years. I browsed through a book outlining the ship's schematics. I used primitive graphic design software on the public library's computer to try to copy the graphic design of the displays on the ship's bridge. I had a plastic phaser and a communicator pin and two Star Trek Christmas tree ornaments. The very first CD I bought had the "Next Generation" theme on it.

Why, in my early teens, I was drawn into a utopian universe full of possibility and promises of a better, kinder tomorrow isn't a big mystery. Still, in retrospect, these things sound weird and obsessive, and obsessively weird. And when I attended a Star Trek convention with a friend a few years ago, I felt strangely out of place, and not just because there were Klingons everywhere. My interest in the show came and went, and has never returned with as much force as it had when "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was being broadcast.

Thus, when the franchise comes to an end Friday — as the final two episodes of "Enterprise" air on UPN — I probably won't even watch. I just don't care, and haven't, really, since "Next Generation" ended.

‘Trek’ has moved away from original themes
Although there's certainly plenty of consternation about the series' conclusion, the end (for now) of Star Trek is long overdue. Television's most prolific science fiction franchise has, over the last 18 years, moved away from the original two series' basic themes: exploration, escapism, and the promise of a better tomorrow. And thus the three most recent series just haven't held up to the standards set by the first two.

On some level, all "Star Trek" series were about exploration. But none of the series that followed "The Next Generation" captured the magic that it managed to produce week after week. Each series — "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," "Star Trek: Voyager," and "Star Trek: Enterprise" — told its stories with varying degrees of success.

However, those three versions grounded themselves in a more gritty, realistic version of the future. While the writers and production designers deserve credit for offering worlds that were perhaps slightly more believable, they lost the fantastic, wondrous approach to space travel that "The Next Generation" borrowed from the original "Star Trek" and then perfected.

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